I’ve told the story a few times now, but when I first started work on Found Forest Floor it looked a lot more like a traditional Abstract Comic. I did 50 pages of comics which then got chopped up and drawn over and abandoned, and those have sort of sit off to the side not doing much since Found Forest Floor came out.

So I’ve put them together in a free PDF that you’re welcome to download and share as much as you like. It’s called Found Forest Raw and you can get it by clicking this:

This one’s taken a bit longer than the others did, but it’s ready now. Like all of the other Forestry Commission outputs, it’s 16 pages long. This one’s a step up from Wolf’s Blood in that it’s now got a new colour (blue). It’s not got any new text, but that’s because the text that I added to Wolf’s Blood was so difficult to get rid of.

This marks the countdown to the Free PDF’s no longer being free, too. After a month, Forestry Commission will be closed — all the links on that page will be turned off. In the meantime, as well as a bunch of other stuff, I’ll be working on getting the pages ready for print, adding text where I feel it’ll help, and then hopefully running a Kickstarter campaign to print a collected edition called ‘The Forest’.

In the meantime, I’m doing a very, very limited run of The Complete Forestry Commission which will be printouts of all of six PDFs, including Found Forest which isn’t currently available anywhere. They’ll be on sale at Robotcon in Sheffield on the 25th March and it there’s any left over I’ll put them up in my Big Cartel shop.

A departure on many fronts — this is the first one with colour (garish acid green throughout) and words. Some of the writing is found text, some of it is a song written by my daughter, and some is stuff I was thinking as I was drawing.

For ThoughtBubble 2016, I created a one-sheet mini-comic which used my ‘intercorstal’ process on pages I’d already ‘interocorstalled’, and made it available digitally, with all the digital assets I’d produced on this blog post, with the invitation for people to go away and do whatever they wanted with the files. Here’s a quick run-down of what I’ve had back so far!

(in no particular order)

Douglas Noble coloured the pages and added text from a section of ‘Solaris’ by Stanislav Lem and made it available as a downloadable PDF, which you can get my clicking on this link: LINK

Henry Miller took an unexpected yet genius turn and combined the linework with photos of John Craven. You can see the original tweet HERE but I’ve added the images here too (which I hope is OK, Henry?)

Eric Seaholm created these pages using Found Forest Floor pages, but so close to the Recorstal thing happening that it counts. Plus, they’re amazing, and I have to share them.

And finally (I think… I don’t think I’ve forgotten anyone) I got this mysterious recorstal in the post, in which a story is told about a lurking monster watching me while I read a book in bed… No name was included, although it turned out to be from those scamps Chris Welsh and Tom Ward, who were apparently planning on turning it into a creepy stalker joke which I totally ruined by pretending to be creeped out by.

That’s it, I think. If I have forgotten anybody then please, please let me know.

Where Rabbit On The Stairs and it’s predecessors were very dense, I knew that whatever came next would have to reset the page somewhat, and give me some space to work in. Say hello, then, to ‘A Salted Wound’, a very decompressed comic.

Oh, and this time it’s in COLOUR. Well, sort of. There’s some blue in it, which other than the cover was very unintentional — a product of how the scanner read some of the original black lines through the white paint I’d covered them up with.

I honestly don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I have a book coming out soon. It’s big — 250 pages long before covers and interior stuff, and it’s called Found Forest Floor. It’s drawn by me, it’s written by Erik Blagsvedt and published by Abstract Editions. It’ll be out in a couple of months, I think.

From those 250 pages, I took 16 and made a little sampler called ‘Found Forest’ to sell at Winchester School of Art’s Small Press event. (You can buy a copy of it HERE and I’ll customise the cover for you, too). And over the past month or so I’ve been working over those pages with white and blank ink and unipins — I’ve been doing it in small chunks, in between other things, because my real-life work has been crazy over the past few weeks.

It’s acted both as an act of catharsis, getting stress out of my body and onto the page, and also as a continuation of the ‘Found Forest Floor’ process. I’ll be carrying a copy of this new comic around and re-working it so I’ll have a new version in a couple of months, too.

tldr: Download everything you need to print and/or make your own Recorstal comics

For ThoughtBubble 2016, which at the time of writing was just last weekend, I decided to ‘re-abstract’ an 8-page sequence from The Intercorstal: 683 to print as a minicomic. Actually drawing it was fine, printing it became a bit of a chore and I ended up with the same comic in a few formats.

I printed 40 of them up as booklets and gave them out to anyone who stopped long enough at my table to show an interest.

Now I send it out into the world. Here’s a link to a ZIP file of all the Recorstal stuff: the original scan, my levelled copy, each individual page and a .pub file which when printed double-sided will give you two fresh copies of the comic.

I’m also eager for people to take this and do whatever they want with it. Colour it in, muck about with the order, draw over the top, whatever. My only caveat is that you tell/show me what you’ve done through the usual channels.